The First London Games: Going for Gold

Seventy-three year-old British artist John Copley became the oldest Olympic medalist at the 1948 London Games, taking silver for his etchings.  It would be the penultimate artistic competition of the modern-era games, all of which have since been segregated from the official medal counts.  He might have made history (for a while, at least), but fortunately this will not be his story.  Instead, BBC America takes viewers to the Thames, where a hastily assembled British sculling duo carries the hopes of their nation in Going for Gold: The ’48 Games (promo here), a one-shot airing this Wednesday as part of the current season of Dramaville.

Bert Bushnell and Dickie Burnell both competed for a spot on the 1948 Olympic team, but fell short.  Pairing-up was not their fallback plan, but the brainchild of five-time British medalist and Olympic committeeman Jack Beresford.  The double sculls is an event close to his heart, since he and his partner upset the favored Germans in front of Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Games.

The stakes are not quite so high for Bushnell and Burnell, but the malaise ridden United Kingdom could use a lift.  London could also use the tourist dollars generated by a successful Olympiad.  However, with mere weeks to go, they still woefully behind on construction.  Evidently, its déjà vu all over again.

Likewise, Bushnell and Burnell have just started training together and it shows.  Socially and temperamentally quite different, the pair clash rather badly.  In fact, the respectably middle class Bushnell’s class resentment of Burnell’s privileged background becomes tiresomely repetitive, perhaps saying more about screenwriter William Ivory (whose credits include the labor drama Made In Dagenham) than two athletes who fundamentally share so much in common.  They both have a passion for their sport, similar last names, and persistent issues with their fathers.

For many viewers (as well as BBC America) the most important thing to know about Gold is the presence of Doctor Who’s Matt Smith as Bushnell.  He is credible enough as the tightly wound rower, but Sam Hoare certainly looks more athletic as Burnell.  He also has some of the better turned straight dramatic scenes.  However, for longtime TV anglophiles, it will be Geoffrey “As Time Goes By” Palmer who stands out as Burnell’s severely reserved father.

If rowing races is your thing, Going for the Gold (a.k.a. Bert & Dickie) is your tele-drama.  Smoothly helmed by TV veteran David Blair, it still is hardly Chariots of Fire-on-the-Thames (notwithstanding one eyebrow raising quote), but it is about on par with most subsequent Summer Olympic movies.  An appealing period production with a decent payoff, Going for Gold is a pleasant enough warm-up for the London Games, recommended for sculling and Olympic enthusiasts when it airs this Wednesday night (7/25) on BBC America’s Dramaville showcase.

Japan Cuts ’12: Rent-a-Cat

It is not much of a business, but at least the inventory is cheap.  In fact, Sayoko attracts stray cats like a magnet.  Profits really are not the point anyway.  She is out to fill the holes in people’s hearts, perhaps even including her own in Naoko Ogigami’s Rent-a-Cat (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2012 edition of Japan Cuts: the New York Festival of Japanese Cinema.

In a sleepy corner of Tokyo, Sayoko lives in the picturesque Minka-esque house she once shared with her beloved late grandmother, along with a dozen or so cats.  The woman has become a crazy cat lady at a young age, but there is a method to her madness.  Most days, she pulls her cart through the neighborhood, hawking cats for rent.  Of course, she will not rent to just anyone.  A home inspection is required.

Intentionally episodic, we watch Sayoko repeat the cat rental ritual with several customers, each with a hole to fill in their lives.  For an elderly widow reluctant to buy a new cat knowing her time is short, Sayoko’s service is a godsend.  However, some clients take a bit of convincing, like the desperately unfulfilled car rental agency manager.  Yet, the most intriguing potential client-story arc involves Yoshizawa, the former delinquent middle school classmate Sayoko initially wants nothing to do with.

Rent-a-Cat is a quiet film, chocked full of feline adorableness.  It wears its sentimental heart on its sleeve, deriving gentle laughs from its characters quirks (to use a loaded word).  However, it is more bittersweet than compulsively cute, particularly during Sayoko’s smartly ambiguous encounter with Yoshizawa.

As Sayoko, Mikako Ichikawa blends goofy awkwardness and sincere sensitivity quite touchingly.  Indeed, it is a very humane performance, displaying real on-screen chemistry with her animal co-stars and Kei Tanaka’s Yoshizawa.

There might not be a lot of surprises in the unhurried Rent-a-Cat, but Ogigami infuses the proceedings with a wistful atmosphere that is quite beguiling.  Essentially, it is an animal lovers’ indie that well reflects traditional Japanese aesthetics of elegant simplicity.  An effective mood piece featuring several nice turns from its small human ensemble, Rent-a-Cat is recommended surprisingly highly for those who suspect they might appreciate its discreet charms.  It screens this coming Wednesday (7/25) at the Japan Society, as this year’s Japan Cuts continues.

Japan Cuts ’12: Chronicle of My Mother

Kosaku Igami follows the golden rule for novelists.  He writes about what he knows.  In his case, he knows about abandonment and mother issues.  Nonetheless, he and his dutiful daughters will look after his aging mother in her years of waning lucidity throughout Masato Harada’s Chronicle of My Mother (trailer here), which screens as part of the Focus on Kôji Yakusho tribute at the 2012 Japan Cuts: the New York Festival of Japanese Cinema.

In the post-war years, Igami’s family temporarily immigrated to Taiwan, but he was left behind with “Granny Nui.”  There were reasons for this, but they were never adequately explained to Igami.  The beloved Granny Nui’s rather ambiguous position within the family further stoked his resentment.  Despite his painful childhood memories, Igami became a success, filling novels and stories with thinly disguised characters based on his family.  This in turn has led to some resentment on his daughters’ part.

Though Igami was never close to his mother, her well-being becomes a constant source of concern for the entire family after the death of his father.  She has always been difficult and Igami’s sisters start to suspect she is exploiting her signs of senility to say whatever caustic comment crosses her mind.  She is a handful alright, but Igami’s daughter Kotoko is willing to hold up more than her end.

Predominantly set in the 1960’s, Chronicle stylistically and thematically harkens back to the great films of Yasujiro Ozu, even invoking Tokyo Story by name.  Kotoko is definitely a figure in the tradition of Ozu’s Norikos, as is her sensitive sister, who happens to be named Noriko.

Though he is still working through the psychological baggage of his youth, Igami is gruff, headstrong, and manly, requiring the kind of presence Japan Cuts special guest Yakusho specializes in.  While the story, based on Yasushi Inoue’s autobiographical novel, charts a somewhat predictable course, Yakusho’s big emotional payoff is hard-earned and honest.  Likewise, Aoi Miyazaki’s work as Kotoko is exquisitely expressive and sensitive.  Yet, the key to the film might be Kiki Kirin’s Mother Yae.  Rather than a full-throttle descent into dementia, she maintains an ambiguity regarding the matriarch’s state of mind, giving viewers hope for some form of familial rapprochement.

 

Indeed, Harada’s approach is refreshingly earnest yet disciplined enough to spurn cheap sentimentality.  While certainly reflecting the specifics of Japanese society, its themes are undeniably universal.  Lovingly shot in warm tones by cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa and featuring a complimentary chamber music soundtrack by Harumi Fuki (with an assist from Bach), Chronicle is richly produced period drama.  Recommended for those who appreciate nostalgic family dramas and tearjerkers with a sense of restraint, Chronicle of My Mother screens tomorrow night (7/21) at the Japan Society, as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Emerald Air: The Runway

The Irish economy in 1983 was a lot like the Irish economy today.  It was not exactly a robust job-creation engine, not that we would know what that’s like these days either.  Yet, when a roguish Colombian crashes lands in a particularly depressed provincial burg, he ignites an unlikely spark of hope in Ian Powers’ The Runway (trailer here), which opens in Scottsdale (of all places) this Friday and is now available on most VOD platforms from Tribeca Films.

Ernesto Cordoba is a bit shady and he does not pretend to be otherwise.  Fortunately, he has young Paco Thomas handling his PR.  Believing the father he never met is a Spaniard immigrant now back in his Iberian homeland, Thomas is the only person in town who speaks Spanish.  He takes a number of liberties with the translations though.  As a result, the formerly dispirited townspeople are inspired to fix the heroic-sounding Cordoba’s plane and fashion him a suitable runway.  This quite confuses the wayward pilot, who is rather in a hurry to get on with his dodgy mission (that seems to involve putting emeralds back in the Emerald Isle).

Naturally, Cordoba ends up staying with Thomas and his mother Grace, who duly pretends she is not attracted to the man of mystery.  Thomas is definitely looking to plug Cordoba in as a surrogate father, but he may have to settle for a bittersweet coming-of-age experience.

If you suspect you know where Runway is headed, you’re surely right, every step of the way.  Nonetheless, it is all relatively pleasant, thanks to the leading man charisma of Demián Bechir’s Cordoba and a host of recognizable salt-of-the-earth Irish character actors, most notably including Game of Thrones’ James Cosmo (technically Scotts) as Sutherland, a junkshop engineer.  Young actors Jamie Kierans and John Carpenter, Jr., as Thomas and his Traveler best pal Frogs Connors, respectively, are never too cute or cloying either.  As Grace Thomas, Kerry Condon has some nice but sparing romantic chemistry with Bechir, as well.

While nowhere near as sharp and clever as John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, Runway ought to satisfy fans of quirky tight little Irish village dramedies like Waking Ned Devine.  Cinematographer P.J. Dillon gives it all a nice heathery shine and Powers keeps it stepping along lightly but without undue dawdling.  An easygoing distraction if hardly essential, The Runway opens tomorrow (7/20) at the Harkins Theatres Shea 14, for the large Scottsdale Irish and Colombian expatriate communities and is available on-demand from Tribeca Films.

Japan Cuts ’12: The Woodsman and the Rain

If you’re wondering where Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones’ fifty-plus mojo went, it’s been in Japan with Kôji Yakusho.  While American audiences might know him best as the salaryman who cuts a rug in Shall We Dance?, nobody working in film today is more credible as a middle-aged man you do not want to mess with.  His hardnosed everyman charm is also perfectly suited to the gently humanistic comedy of Shȗichi Okita’s The Woodsman and the Rain (trailer here), which screens as the centerpiece of this year’s Japan Cuts and a key selection of their Focus on Kôji Yakusho retrospective sidebar.

If you have seen Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, you know what a dynamic presence Yakusho can be in an action-driven film.  If you haven’t, the Japan Society will give you an opportunity this Saturday.  It’s kind of awesome, but Woodsman is too, in a very different way.  Here Yakusho plays a sixty year-old lumberjack and you would not want to be a tree in his sites.  He is not a superhero though.  Having survived a health scare, Yatsuhiko Kishi (Yatsu-san) can no longer eat sweets.  The widower’s relationship with his slacker son Koichi is strained at best.  However, he can now predict precipitation with uncanny accuracy.  Given the title, this ability will obviously come into play at some point, but wisely nobody in the film belabors it.

Kishi is pretty set in his routine, until a film crew comes to town.  Much to his own surprise, he finds himself shuttling about a nervous assistant director and a socially awkward twenty-something in search of locations for their zombie film.  That quiet kid turns out to be Koichi Tanabe, the first time director with massive confidence issues.  Yes, he has the same first name as Kishi’s son, but Okita never overplays that card either.

Before you know it, Kishi is deeply involved in the shooting of Tanabe’s dubious b-movie.  Many of these scenes are essentially played for laughs, but in an earthy, understated way.  Still, for genre film fans, how can you resist a film about lumberjacks and movie-zombies?

Woodsman is a perfect film to anchor the Yakusho showcase.  His performance is rich, nuanced, and deeply felt.  He is a good sport, willing to look slightly ridiculous at times, yet he always maintains his dignified bearing.  As the Koichis, both Shun Oguri and Kengo Kora grow on viewers, subtly but convincingly showing their characters grow up as the film progresses.

Not exactly bittersweet, but certainly not compulsively cheerful either, Woodsman is ultimately wholly satisfying, in a rugged, down-to-earth way.  It is a great example of Yakusho’s powerful screen presence as well as a wistfully wise bit of storytelling.  Very highly recommended, The Woodsman and the Rain screens this Saturday at the Japan Society as this year’s Japan Cuts centerpiece (featuring an intro and Q&A with the man himself), but good luck getting in.  It is already sold out, so if you do not have your ticket booked, you’re flying stand-by.  Also very highly recommended, tickets for 13 Assassins and Shall We Dance? are currently available on Saturday (7/21).

Japan Cuts ’12: Girls for Keeps

Japan is the land of the rising Hello Kitty.  Cuteness is a big deal here.  It is all Yukiko Takigawa was ever good at.  However, people are telling her she is slightly less young than she once was and should maybe consider dressing like a schoolmarm now.  Takigawa and her friends will juggle their personal and professional lives as best they can in Yoshihiro Fukagawa’s Girls for Keeps (trailer here), which screens tomorrow as part of the 2012 Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Japanese Cinema.

Yes, this is a chick flick.  Profoundly so, in fact, but at least the cast is attractive from top to bottom, unlike a certain former HBO show some might be tempted to compare with Takigawa’s fab four (it’s even based on a chick lit novel). 

Though roughly the same age, each is at a very different point in their lives.  Seiko Takeda has just received a plum promotion, but her passed-over chauvinist colleague is determined to undermine her authority.  Takako Hirai works hard at a luxury dealership and even harder as a single parent to her young son.  Sales manager Yoko Kosaka used to just plug away at the office, but when she is assigned an attractive but much younger trainee, she starts losing her cool.  Meanwhile, Takigawa has an opportunity to finally make her mark in the fashion industry, but a dowdy rival is not about to make things easy for her.

Yes, those relationship things sure are tricky.  Careers are no walk in the park either.  This might sound like somewhat shopworn material for Bridget Jones-saturated viewers, but it seems safe to assume Japanese boardrooms remain a far cry from Manhattan publishing offices.  The stakes for Takeda are actually quite high, which is why even the jaded will find themselves rooting for her nemesis’s comeuppance.

Indeed, Girls starts a tad slow, but hits its stride as it catwalks along.  Takeda’s office intrigue is rather compelling and Takigawa’s relationship with her slacker boyfriend turns out to be far more interesting than it first appears.  All four co-leads are quite engaging, particularly Kumiko Asô (no stranger to Japan Cuts regulars from films like The Seaside Motel and Bare Essence of Life Ultra Miracle Love Story), who is quite engaging as Takeda, realistically wrestling with sexism and her own self-doubts.   Likewise, Karina’s Takigawa is a sweetly endearing protagonist-narrator (worlds removed from her electric turn in the Japan Cuts favorite Parade).

Despite a small army of characters and a bushel of subplots, Girls’ four primary story arcs hang together fairly well.  Refreshingly, it is maintains both a sense of idealism as well as a responsible level-headed world view.  Takigawa and her friends come to terms with the fact they cannot absolutely have it all, while also recognizing they should not automatically write-off major life options wholesale—to thine own self be true, but don’t kick yourself for making a few concessions here or there.  If Girls is more than a bit manipulative in getting to its morale, well that goes with the territory.  A cut above the genre standard thanks to its ensemble, Girls for Keeps is recommended for fans of Bridget Jones, Lifetime movies, and the talented Japanese cast.  It screens tomorrow night (7/18) at the Japan Society as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Auteuil Remakes Pagnol: The Well-Digger’s Daughter

Class, social convention, and World War I are powerful forces aligned against a young woman’s happiness.  Yet, she may eventually find her place in a world changing faster than she realizes in lead actor-director-screen adaptor Daniel Auteuil’s respectful remake of Marcel Pagnol’s The Well-Digger’s Daughter (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Pascal Amoretti digs and repairs wells.  It is hard but honest work, still quite necessary in the early Twentieth Century southern French provinces.  The widower was blessed and cursed with a brood of six girls.  Old Amoretti has come to rely on the eldest, Patricia, to manage his household, but she has reached marriageable age.  A match with his smitten older employee Felipe Rambert would suit the working class patriarch nicely, but Patricia’s has eyes only for Jacques Mazel, the dashing young officer son of the town’s well-to-do hardware merchant.

Despite knowing the impossibility of their affair, the young woman loses her head with the military aviator the night before he ships out to the front.  When Mazel is reported missing-in-action not long after, the pregnant Amoretti must face her shame alone.  Mazel’s parents certainly are not interested in acknowledging the girl and her traditional father is at loss, unable to see around society’s constraints.

The thing about Digger though is that the fallen Amoretti’s fortunes are not set in stone.  People will rise to the occasion and redeem themselves.  Though the village gossips would hardly put it in such terms, hers really is a story of virtue rewarded.  How she gets there will be quite the trick.  Chocked full of tearful confrontations and convenient revelations, Digger could have easily descended into sentimental treacle, but first-time helmer Auteuil keeps it all concretely grounded in the characters’ natural and social environments.

Already a favorite of the Pagnol estate after his career-making performances in Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Auteuil is reportedly already developing more Pagnol projects.  As the painfully dignified and conflicted father, he sets the tone for the deeply empathetic Digger.  Likewise, Kad Merad’s Rambert is more than just a likable lug, but a profoundly understanding old soul.  Astrid Berges-Frisbey is genuinely moving in her scenes with Auteuil, while also developing convincing chemistry with Nicolas Devauchelle’s not as caddish as he sounds Mazel.  An unusually forgiving film, it pardons the transgressions of everyone, even the severe Mme. Mazel.

The old-fashionedness of Digger is truly its virtue.  Perhaps, some of its rigid class-consciousness will be lost on some perpetually social-climbing Americans, but most viewers will be lulled by Jean-François Robin’s lush pastoral cinematography and Alexandre Desplat’s nostalgic score.  A handsome period production with several worthy screen turns, The Well-Digger’s Daughter is easily recommended for Francophiles and patrons of literary dramas when it opens this Friday (7/20) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

Premiere Brazil! ’12: Songs

The Great American Songbook’s closest rival for addressing love and longing in rhymed couplets must be Brazilian popular song.  You do not have to understand Portuguese to get the message.  Brazilian documentarian Eduardo Coutinho explores how popular and personal songs shaped the memories of everyday people in the straightforwardly titled Songs (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2012 Premiere Brazil! continuing at MoMA.

The format could not be simpler.  Coutinho interviewed forty-two Brazilians, mostly from what could be called a working class background, about the role songs played in their lives.  Probably only two of the eighteen who made the final cut had any sort of prior professional performance experience.  After answering a series of questions, each will sing a song rife with meaning to them, completely a cappella. 

There is no question Déa Franco is a polished performer and a still vibrant screen presence.  A veteran of Ary Barroso’s talent shows, her showstopper ought to her a Buena Vista Social Club­-esque late career re/birth.  Barosso, perhaps best known for the song-suite “Watercolor of Brazil” featured in Disney’s Saludos Amigos, is one of a handful of musical legends who figure prominently in the memories of Songs’ subjects, along with Roberto Carlos and Jorge Ben. 

Under Coutinho’s coaxing, several “Miss Otis” moments are recalled the film.  When German expat Isabell Erdmann, the film’s other clear professional or semi-pro, tells of how she and another German friend were abruptly dumped by their Brazilian husband and lover respectively, Coutinho knowingly comments just how “Brazilian” that is.  Oddly though, the film’s emotional peak comes somewhat early when “Gilmar” shocks himself, tearing up at the memory of his seamstress mother singing “Esmeralda” as she worked.  It rather perfectly illustrates Coutinho’s point.

There is an unusual elegance to Coutinho’s Spartan approach, but the lack of accompaniment could prove limiting to the film’s appeal.  It is hard to see it taking off like the Buena Vista doc, even though it speaks directly to more universal experiences.  It also lacks the star power of established name on-camera participants to attract fests and distributors, so those interested had best see it when it screens during Premiere Brazil!  Recommended for fans of Brazilian music and unabashed sentimentalists, Songs screens this coming Wednesday (7/18) and next Sunday (7/22) at MoMA.

Premiere Brazil! ’12: Heleno

Adoring fans can be dangerous to your health.  You could have asked Brazilian football legend Heleno de Freitas about it, but that would have been a very one-sided conversation.  The one-two punch of syphilis and ether addiction might have directly ravaged his body and mind, but he was really undone by his inner demons.  As a result, there is much more tragedy than triumph in his real life sports story, dramatized in José Enrique Fonseca’s Heleno (trailer here), which screens this week during MoMA’s annual Premiere Brazil!

Before Pelé, there was de Freitas.  He really was a once in a generation player.  Yet he never appeared in a world cup match for Brazil.  First World War II preempted the Cup, then de Freitas’s erratic conduct essentially preempted himself.  When he was good, he was great, but he was never much of a team player.  Poor Alberto could attest to that.  Ostensibly de Freitas’s best friend and team-captain, the decent old chap is often the object of de Freitas’s back-handed contempt.

Initially, there are plenty of women coming and going in the diva-striker’s life, but he eventually settles on two: his wife Silvia, a respectable woman from a good family and Diamantina, the sultry big band vocalist.  Obviously, this is one too many—at least if asked either of the women.  Unfortunately, the bad seeds of his wild years have already been sown.  Though he is urged to get treatment, Heleno is too busy making a hash of his life, both personally and professionally.

Told in a series of flashbacks from his long, hopeless period of institutionalization, Heleno has to be one of the darkest, most pessimistic sports films in years.  Shot in a massively stylish black-and-white by cinematographer Walter Carvalho (arguably Brazil’s most preeminent), the film has a noir sensibility that is way more Lost Weekend than Pride of the Yankees.  A far cry from “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth,” Heleno comes to believe he is saddled with persistent bad luck, but everything is clearly his own fault.

Frankly, there is not a lot of on-the-field action, but when there is, it is hardly glorious.  Heleno is almost an anti-sports bio-pic, grimly depicting the consequences of groupie hook-ups and ether abuse.  It is not a pretty picture.  At least Heleno sounds great, featuring several era-appropriate big band numbers and a licensed Billie Holiday song (Ellington’s “Solitude”).

As Diamantina, Colombian actress Angie Cepeda seems pretty credible behind the microphone and she (or whoever it is) sounds quite pleasing on the soundtrack.  Strangely though, she looks like she could be the sister of Alinne Moraes’s Silvia, which makes the love triangle harder to keep straight.  However, 300’s Rodrigo Santoro is undeniably the main event, falling apart spectacularly as de Freitas.  It is big, fiery performance, marked explosive rage and a painfully slow psychotic break from the outside world.  As a cautionary turn, it certainly ought to scare kids away from the ether bottle.

Featuring bravura work from Santoro in front of the camera and Carvalho behind it, Heleno is a striking period production and an uncompromising depiction of self-destructive behavior and mental illness.  Though de Freitas might not have Pelé’s name recognition, the Brazilian football (soccer) angle ought to guarantee it a devoted cult audience during festival play.  Recommended for those who enjoy a sophisticated 1940’s vibe and appreciate a classically tragic fall from grace, Heleno screens again this Wednesday (7/18) in New York, as part of MoMA’s 2012 Premiere Brazil!

Japan Cuts ’12 & NYAFF ’12: Gyo

The end of the world is nigh and it smells like feet.  Mutant fish flatulence is a tough way for humanity to go out, but it looks like our number is up, nonetheless.  Prepare yourself for a messy apocalypse in Takayuki Hirao’s Gyo (trailer here), which must be poised on the brink of taking the world by storm after it screened yesterday as a co-presentation of the 2012 Japan Cuts and New York Asian film festivals.

Kaori and her friends are spending their last spring break together vacationing in Okinawa.  This will not be a good time to be near the water.  She is hot but nice.  Erika is hot and mean.  Aki, the third one, is plain and dumb.  They will act accordingly throughout the impending crisis.  It turns out the trio is on the front line.  They are the first to record an encounter with the stinky fish with strange bio-mechanical legs.  It turns out there were plenty more where that one came from and they have already overrun Tokyo.

Fearing the worst from a disconnect with her fiancé Tadashi, Kaori rushes back to the fish-battered city, hooking up with Shirakawa, an only slightly sleazy photojournalist.  Ostensibly acting as her protector, Shirakawa really wants to get a story from Tadashi’s at least partially mad scientist uncle, who has apparently become the world’s preeminent authority on “walking fish” in a matter of hours.

Nothing says End of Days like hordes of walking fish cascading over Tokyo’s boulevards.  However, it is the death stench that is the real poison, mutating humans through their open wounds.  It looks like it is payback time for all that sushi Japanese chefs served up.

By the way, Gyo is not for kids.  As if all the mutant mayhem were not enough of a red flag for parents, let’s just say Kaori’s friend Erika is kind of a tramp.  It did not screen as part of the Anime from Hell sidebar for nothing.  Considering how gleefully notorious it will surely become, Gyo is sure to be picked up by other festivals, so you’ve been warned.

Give Gyo credit—it takes the wild premise of Junji Ito’s manga and runs with it.  There are times it plays like the anime equivalent of a Roger Corman film, but how can that be a bad thing?  To Gyo’s further credit, it features a strong female protagonist, though it would probably be a stretch to call it empowering, unless you’re a fish.  It should also be noted those mutant farting fish seem to be the result of a nefarious Imperial Japanese research project during WWII.  Frankly, North Korean lunacy would be a more likely culprit, but it is just nice to see this one not blamed on the American military, as in Bong Joon-ho’s overrated The Host.

This is a good film to see with an audience.  Indeed, it is surely fair to say most of the patrons at the Japan Society felt they got their money’s worth, even if nobody will be mistaking it for a Miyazaki film anytime ever.  Worthy of a long run of midnight festival screenings, Gyo was an entertaining bit of strangeness for this year’s NYAFF and Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Japanese Cinema.

Premiere Brazil! ’12: I’d Receive the Worst News from Your Beautiful Lips

Cheating with a minister’s wife is like asking for divine payback.  The preacher might be a bit of an environmental rabble-rouser, but the other man is still in for a heap of trouble, albeit of a decidedly worldly variety, in Beto Brant & Renato Ciasca’s I’d Receive the Worst News from Your Beautiful Lips (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2012 Premiere Brazil!, now running at MoMA.

In provincial Amazonia, there is not much to do besides clear-cutting rainforest and having illicit affairs.  Two hot-blooded outsiders like Cauby and Lavinia are better suited to the latter.  He is a photographer wandering the region, picking up freelance gigs taking mug-shots and snooping through keyholes for the local scandal sheet.  She is the wife of tree-hugging Christian Ernani.  Though she desires her fevered assignations with the increasingly obsessed Cauby, she still feels affection and a debt of gratitude to her ardent but somewhat older husband.  Secrecy is therefore important, but there is nothing harder to maintain in a small town.

Lips (if ever a title merited abbreviation, if would be Brant and Ciasca’s adaptation of Marçal Aquino’s novel) changes genres faster than the Amazonian weather turns.  It starts out like a Brazilian Red Shoe Diary, segues into a Body Heat noir thriller, finally ending with melodrama worthy of a telenovela.  It is actually reasonably competent observing the conventions of all three, but only truly masters the softcore eroticism of the first act.

Indeed, Lips is definitely a film for those who appreciate a relatively classy looking love scene.  However, the sympathetic portrayal of the Evangelical Ernani is a pleasant surprise, regardless of his outspokenly green sermons.  There is nothing hypocritical or unseemly about him.  In fact, he emerges as an almost saintly figure in the film’s distracting flashback scenes.

As Cauby and Lavinia, Gustavo Machado and Camila Pitanga are perfectly credible throwing themselves at each other and are more or less passable as the film progresses into darker territory.  Arguably, ZéCarlos Machado’s work as Ernani is the film’s most nuanced and intriguing, but there are also several small but colorful supporting performances that give Lips character.

Of course, setting looms large in Lips.  Viewers can just feel the humid sultriness as Cauby and  Lavinia commune with nature or prowl through their nocturnal world.  Cinematographer Lula Araújo gives it all a silky sheen appropriate to the over-the-top on-screen passion.  While Lips’ final act is an extended let down, the entire film is certainly evocative and never really dull.   A visually appealing production, Lips should fit the bill for those who enjoy steamy cinema with a veneer of art-house sophistication.  Obviously not for general audiences, Lips screens tomorrow (7/15) and Tuesday, July 24^th, as this year’s Premiere Brazil! continues at MoMA.  Viewer discretion is advised.

Premiere Brazil ’12: Matraga

Those who know their Brazilian cinema and literature will know Augusto Esteves, a.k.a. Matraga, is one bad cat.  The protagonist of João Guimarães Rosa’s short story, adapted for the screen in 1965 by Roberto Santos, made a triumphant return, sweeping most of the prizes at the 2011 Rio International Film Festival, proving Brazilians appreciate a rugged convert.  Once again, he sees the light in Vinícius Coimbra’s Matraga (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2012 edition of Premiere Brazil!, now underway at MoMA.

Better at drinking and whoring than farming, Esteves has made his share of enemies, most definitely including Major Consilva.  Eleven of the local land baron’s gunslingers got the jump on him out in the wild grasslands.  It was a decent idea, but they did not bring enough men.  They will learn from this mistake.  Using the incident as a pretext to banish his wife and child, Esteves continues his reckless hedonism, pressing his luck.  Beaten and branded, Esteves is left for dead after pitching head first into rocky gorge.  However, a devout elderly couple nurses his broken body back to health and puts his spirit on the path of righteous.

Though sometimes tempted to give into his inner demons, Esteves holds to the Christian faith of his adopted parents, living with them in anonymous isolation.  Eventually, the powerful landlord Joaozinho Bem-Bem and his extra-legal posse of enforcers ride into Esteves’ village, like a Brazilian John Tunstall and the Regulators, hoping to skirt a company of legitimate government troops.  Much to their surprise, Matraga receives them in the spirit of Christian hospitality, welcoming them into his home.  Recognizing a kindred spirit beneath Esteves’ pious exterior, Bem-Bem feels an instant rapport with the reformed killer.  Indeed, their fates will be intertwined.

Matraga is often billed as a Brazilian spaghetti western and that is fair to an extent.  Yet, Esteves is as much Paul on the Road to Damascus as the Man with No Name.  In truth, it is quite a solid film, but it will be tricky finding the right audience for it beyond Brazilian cinema showcases, such as MoMA’s Premiere.  This is a brooding film that treats issues of faith with deadly seriousness.  Still, when its go time, everyone gets down to business as the bullets fly.

Glowering impressively, João is convincingly fierce and conflicted as Esteves.  He handles the fight scenes quite credibly, but most importantly his depiction of the character’s hard won new faith is grittily realistic and in no way caricatured.  Nonetheless, José Wilker earns most of the film’s style points as the smoothly lethal Bem-Bem.

Clearly, Coimbra and cinematographer Lula Carvalho were taken with the wide open vistas of the Minais Gerais countryside, giving it the full John Ford treatment.  Yet, what is most notable is the manner the film stays true to the expectations of the western genre and the integrity of Esteves’ post-conversion character.  That is quite a trick.  Partly a moody, unhurried art film and partly a violent western shootout, is recommended fairly strongly for patrons of Brazilian cinema and those drawn to dark morality tales when it screens this coming Tuesday (7/17) and the following Sunday (7/22) as part of the tenth annual Premiere Brazil! at MoMA.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps

The spirit of enterprise is not completely dead in Greece.  It just manifests itself self in peculiarly dark ways.  A nameless quartet has joined forces to provide a strange service.  They act as stand-ins for recently deceased loved ones.  However, matters get decidedly complicated when one member starts freelancing in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

They call themselves “Alps,” because those mountains often substitute for other ranges in films and TV.  Actually, it would be more accurate to say their leader, “Mount Blanc,” calls them Alps.  He is definitely the one running a show.  Mount Blanc the paramedic and his nurse colleague are obviously well placed to prospect for new clients.  Mount Blanc thinks the parents of a teenaged tennis player not expected to survive an auto accident look like promising candidates, but the nurse decides she wants to take them on solo. 

This is a clear violation of the Alps’ rules.  It also hardly seems practical. The student gymnast (Alps member #3) would be a much better surrogate for the couples’ daughter.  Yet, nobody seems to worry about resemblances or even rudimentary acting ability when employing the troupe.  Simply having a warm body in place of the late family member is apparently sufficient.  Just how well did these people know their dearly beloved?  This is an especially apt question for the couple the nurse hijacks, given the not so subtle clues we are given regarding their relationship with their daughter.

Of course, there are not a lot of healthy relationships in Alps, whether it is the less than encouraging coach (Alps member #4) imperiously overseeing the gymnast’s training, or the increasingly erratic nurse, whose inappropriate overtures to her father he sternly rebukes.  Clearly, Lanthimos will spare the audience little.

Alps is one of those densely compacted films that rather asks for excessive interpretation.  Yes, the line between role-playing and self-delusion can be slippery and identity is a persistently problematic notion.  Nonetheless, sometimes a cigar is really a cigar and not a class conscious statement on Euro-austerity.  In a way, Alps is somewhat akin to David Lynch at his most indulgent, but even Lost Highway gave viewers the trappings of a genre picture to hold onto.  Instead, Alps is mostly a series of uncomfortable episodes, ostensibly rife with significance, produced with an oppressively institutional color palette.

The auteur responsible for the Oscar-nominated Dogtooth, Lanthimos is a filmmaker with a burgeoning international reputation, whose work has to be taken into account by anyone seriously following the world cinema scene.  Still, that does not make Alps anymore fun to watch.  A coldly detached detour into a postmodern blind alley, Alps never makes good on the promise of its legitimately intriguing premise.  Recommended exclusively for Lanthimos’ stalwart champions, Alps opens today (7/13) in New York at the Cinema Village.

Red Lights: They Mean Stop, Don’t Go

Sigourney Weaver has gone from ghost-busting to ghost debunking.  However, she may have met her match in Simon Silver, a notorious television psychic from the 1970’s, who comes out of retirement for nefarious purposes in Rodrigo Cortés’ Red Lights (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Dr. Margaret Matheson (a Richard Matheson hat-tip, perhaps?) is the chair of the department of skepticism.  Her rival, Dr. Paul Shackleton, is the chair of the department of believing any spooky thing that might bring in funding.  She and her colleague Dr. Tom Buckley expose psychic frauds, while Shackleton plays with his flash cards.  Simon Silver was the one that got away.  Supposedly vindicated by a flawed laboratory study Matheson refused to sign-off on, Silver’s triumph has always been a blot on her reputation. 

With the Uri Geller inspired villain back in the public eye, Buckley is spoiling for a fight and sweating profusely, but Matheson is gun shy.  Even if he does not have psychic powers, Silver is a master of finding his critics’ weak spots and exploiting them.  Yet, with all the stuff suddenly going bump in the night, we are led to wonder whether or not the psychic really does command dark forces after all.

The first half of Red is a rather nifty little paranormal investigation procedural, but once Weaver’s Matheson is unwisely removed from the equation, the film completely craters.  Logic is treated with contempt and the indie breakout sensation Elizabeth Olsen is stuck standing around with nothing to do, besides sleep with her T.A.  To make matters worse, Buckley’s closing monologue and subsequent voiceover narration invite open mockery, following a climax that looks like it was plagiarized from the Harry Potter franchise.  They are so over-the-top, they make the newly rediscovered Ed Wood film, Final Curtain, sound sharp and focused by comparison.

Weaver brings a reliably smart and mature presence to the film as Matheson and she develops a likable and realistic chemistry with Cillian Murphy’s Buckley.  Frankly, the female mentor-male protégé relationship is not often seen in films and it is quite nicely turned here.  Unfortunately, all the woo-woo effects get awfully sour very quickly.  It is also another depressing reminder of the fall of Robert De Niro, once again playing an icily impassive villain in a dark business suit.

Red really can be divided into two distinct parts.  One is pretty engaging.  The other is ridiculous and utterly clichéd.  Sadly, the latter is the somewhat longer concluding piece, which essentially sinks the entire film.  A severe return trip to the editing bay was advocated for Red here when it screened at Sundance, but given the venom heaped on its embarrassingly overwrought conclusion, this clearly did not happen.  As a result, Red is ultimately a disappointment, not recommended, despite the nice work from Weaver up top.  It opens today (7/13) in New York at the AMC Empire.

Japan Cuts ’12 & NYAFF ’12: Chips

After the devastating 2011 earthquake, the city of Sendai could use something to cheer about.  An unassuming burglar could too.  He has a girlfriend considerably out of his league and a mentor who cares about him in his own gruff fashion, but he has a lot of issues gnawing at him.  However, redemption may yet arrive through the most unlikeliest of agencies in Yoshihiro Nakamura’s graceful knockout punch of a film, Potechi (Chips), the official closing film of the 2012 New YorkAsian Film Festival, co-presented with the 2012 edition of Japan Cuts: The NewYork Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema (trailer here).

Tadashi Imamura dresses like a gasman, but it is just a front.  He works pretty steadily though, since the ringleader (a.k.a. “the CEO”) of a burglary ring has taken a shine to him.  Earnest to a fault, the young thief is pretty good at his job, having been trained by one of the best—the glacially stoic Kurosawa.  Breaking-and-entering has been good to Imamura.  Through a strange set of circumstances, a job led to his relationship with the attractive Wakaba.  However, Imamura gets an odd sensation of déjà vu when he drags his indulgent girlfriend on a fateful break-in.

Imamura did not just happen to be in a certain baseball player’s apartment when the phone rings.  Ozaki has long been his sports idol.  The player used to be Sendai’s local hero during his high school years, but for several seasons he has been stuck riding the pine for the local pro franchise.  Imamura still has faith though, feeling a certain connection to the player.  As it happens, he and Ozaki share the same birth date.

Potechi (or Chips depending on which website you visit) is driven by a confluence of coincidences, yet Nakamura never bashes the audience over the head with them.  Instead, he allows them to quietly accumulate over time.  What could have been heavy as an anvil is quite subtle and beguiling, until Nakamura dexterously lowers the climatic emotional boom.

As the felonious Obiwan figure, Nao Ohmori (still best known as Ichi the Killer) displays super-heroic powers of understatement, dominating his scenes with his uber-gravitas.  Still, it is Gaku Hamada who truly sets the tenor of the film as Imamura with a performance so sincere, it sort of hurts.  Fumino Kimura’s spirited Wakaba keeps the proceedings nicely grounded, while Nakamura himself steals a few scenes as the CEO.

Potechi (Chips) is a fantastic little film, but the sixty-eight minute running time might make it difficult for some fests to program (fyi, stay for the stinger during the closing credits).  Fortunately, Japan Cuts and NYAFF will screen anything they jolly well feel like, which is why they rock.  In an elliptical way, it is a film about healing that earns its payoff fair and square.  Very highly recommended, Potechi (Chips) screens this Sunday (7/15) as the 2012 NYAFF closes and the 2012 Japan Cuts continues with its independent selections.

Japan Cuts ’12 & NYAFF ’12: Monster’s Club

Not content with the sarin gas cult and the United Red Amy, transgressive auteur Toshiaki Toyoda has also relocated Ted Kaczynski to Japan.  He’s welcome to him.  Toyoda’s takes the audience inside the cabin of Ryoichi Kakiuchi, as he is called in this context, if not necessarily his soul in Monster’s Club (trailer here), which screens as a joint presentation of the 2012 Japan Cuts and New York Asian film festivals.

Kakiuchi likes to send bombs to prominent members of the economic establishment.  Everyone should have a hobby.  If you are wondering why, he’d be happy to explain.  His Henry George-ish ideas on labor and production are the whole point of his terrorism.  He was not always a psychopathic loner.  Viewers will come to suspect his evil evolution was initiated by some profound family trauma, most notably involving the radical brother he idolized, when the mad bomber is visited by either ghosts from the past or hallucinations.

While not exactly soliciting sympathy for Kakiuchi, Toyoda expects viewers to appreciate his complexity.  However, the soul-deadened fanatic seems a rather simplistic, emotionally frozen character.  After a few setbacks in life, suddenly everyone is either an exploiter or an unenlightened slave in his judgment and therefore fair game for devices that go boom.

Frankly, patrons are well within their rights if they decide they are disinclined to identify with someone who kills people to serve his extremist ideology right from the outset.  To make matters more daunting, the severe reserve of Eita’s performance and the chilly detachment of Toyoda’s approach do little to pull in the reluctant, in spite of themselves.

A bold stylist, Toyoda creates some striking visuals in Club.  Yet, the epic catharsis of his last film, Blood of Rebirth, is conspicuously missing here.  A metaphysical allegory largely considered a veiled commentary on his much publicized legal trouble, Toyoda dragged the archetypal Buddhist hero Oguri Hangan Daisukeshige through the dark recesses of his soul, ultimately embracing life on the other side.   Conversely, Kakiuchi withdraws from life, while rhetorically berating those who live an unexamined existence.  Rebirth also had some monster drum breaks.  Still, Mayuu Kusakari, who was so devastating in Toyoda’s prior film, again has some finely turned moments in a smaller role, Kakiuchi’s sister, who is alive and well and beginning to understand her brother is out of his mind.

If you are looking for whizbang plotting, this is not the film for you.  If your aesthetic sensibility leans more towards the austere, then maybe.  It is certainly a challenging cinematic statement by any measure, but at least it clocks in at a manageable seventy-two minutes.  Toyoda is a filmmaker who always merits attention and his work has a tendency to appreciate in the viewers’ subconscious.  In retrospect, Rebirth has become one of my most vivid cinematic memories of 2010, so who knows how Club will ferment over time.  Narrowly recommended for hardy and slightly unkempt cineastes, rather than us tragically unhip bourgeoisie, Monster’s Club screens Sunday (7/15) as a co-selection of this year’s Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema and the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival.

Ai Weiwei not at YBCA: Disturbing the Peace & So Sorry

Arguably, Ai Weiwei is the single most important artist of our time.  One might expect the Chinese government to take pride in his international preeminence, but instead they are threatening him with specious bigamy and pornography indictments.  While best known for his architecture and large scale installations, he is also a filmmaker—and rather a muckraking one at that.  Indeed, it is easy to understand the Communist regime’s relentless campaign against Teacher Ai after viewing his fearless documentary investigations of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Defiantly exposing the hypocrisies of the Chinese justice system, Ai Weiwei’s Disturbing the Peace and So Sorry will screen as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ enormously timely retrospective, now underway in San Francisco.

Still prohibited from traveling, the artist will not be present for these screenings.  The series includes several of Ai’s films recording his ambitious artistic projects that are surely well worth your time and attention.  However, Disturbing and Sorry are particularly relevant to the legal purgatory he now finds himself in.  Following the 2008 quake, Teacher Ai and his assistants launched a campaign to tabulate an accurate death toll of the students killed by shoddy so-called “tofu” school construction and record each name.  Yet, every time they asked the authorities for fatality statistics, they were branded American or Japanese spies.

While both Sichuan documentaries cover overlapping events, Disturbing concentrates on Teacher Ai’s direct challenges to the government authorities.  As the film opens, Ai has returned to Chengdu to appear as a witness at the trial of Tan Zuoren, an independent researcher also investigating the Sichuan earthquake.  Denied his day in court, Ai and his party are rousted and detained by the police at three in morning.  Teacher Ai is physically assaulted and one of his assistants is ominously whisked away, without any pretense of due process.

Ai subsequently returns with the woman’s husband and Tan’s fearless attorney Pu Zhiqiang to demand answers.  Finally jumping through enough hoops to meet face-to-face with a reasonably high-ranking bureaucrat, Ai makes it plain they will not leave until they receive a satisfactory accounting.  Frankly, the meets gets rather ugly, with Ai dropping f-bombs and openly questioning the integrity of the man across from him.  He had a right to be irritable though, having not eaten for hours on end, as the apparatchiks stalled and dissembled.  Clearly, Ai and his colleagues believe the only hope they have of securing her release depends on them staying in that conference and in the authorities’ faces.  From what viewers see, they do not seem far wrong in their judgment.

So Sorry also covers the Sichuan earthquake and the scandalous aftermath, but the focus is slightly different.  We see more of the investigation itself and hear from some of the devastated parents, whose grief is compounded by China’s One Child policy.  While Ai again confronts agents of the state not so subtly surveilling him, the grim drama in Sorry centers around Ai’s cerebral hemorrhage resulting from the Chengdu attack, coming while he is in the midst of preparing a major exhibition in Germany.

Not surprisingly, Alison Klayman’s forthcoming documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry draws heavily on Ai’s Sichuan films.  However, if you have only seen the excerpts, you haven’t seen the half of it.  Disturbing the Peace is particularly staggering, as Ai “talks truth to power” in a way officialdom is most definitely not accustomed to.  Especially telling is the way he needles them with the Party’s own rhetoric.  It is also chilling to witness, knowing how dearly he will pay for his boldness.

It is hard to think of two braver, more revealing documentaries than Ai’s Sichuan films.  They are literally video dispatches from an Orwellian police state.  Viewed together, the two films conclusively establish tens of thousands of young lives were needless lost and those who ask questions will find themselves in serious jeopardy.  One would hardly expect them to meet with the Party’s approval, but they make it easy to understand why so many everyday Chinese citizens have rallied to support Teacher Wei during his Kafkaesque ordeal. 

Immeasurably important for understanding contemporary China, Disturbing the Peace screens this Sunday (7/15) as part of the YBCA’s Ai Weiwei series.  Recommended nearly as earnestly, So Sorry screens the following Sunday (7/22) as part of a double bill with Ordos 100, Teacher Ai’s record of a yet unfinished architectural project in Mongolia.  More than just topical programming, the YBCA deserves great credit for keeping Ai Weiwei and his work, both the political and the artistic, in the public eye at this critical period of time.